


the sundered

by tielan



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Angst, Friendship, Gen, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-27
Updated: 2011-12-27
Packaged: 2017-10-28 06:09:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/304590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tielan/pseuds/tielan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Driftwood was once a part of a greater whole, with a purpose and a meaning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the sundered

**Author's Note:**

> For the SGA Saturday prompt for week 14 - driftwood. Thanks to the people who threw the ideas out for me to try, and thanks to [info]ileliberte whose musings sparked the ideas behind the story. Very short and angsty.

Once before, Teyla stood in a city full of people she did not know, who cared little for her history or her skills.

The Athosians had left for the mainland, and she had remained behind in Atlantis. And although it had been her choice to remain, still she felt adrift, cut off from the root and branch of the people to which she had belonged, left to wash up on strange shores and make of herself what she would.

But that was years ago.

Now, Teyla stands in a city full of people who hurry past knowing nothing of her origins or her skills.

A constant flow of noise assails her - not the sound of the wind or the trees, nor the dust skittering across the tent, nor the lap of the sea’s tides, but the chatter and burble and clatter and buzz of Earth’s cities, Earth’s people, Earth’s technology.

She stands in the middle of a street fair a solitary soul in a planet whose population is so numerous that it beggars the entire population of her home galaxy.

And in spite of the noise and the bustle and the people, she feels very much alone.

"Teyla?" John comes up to her, a worn-out Torren in his arms. A silvery balloon sails high and gleaming, attached to a string that is tied around her son’s wrist. "You okay?"

In her throat lodges a sharp and sudden longing for the emptiness of Pegasus - for a city sailing on an endless sea.

Now Teyla is washed up on the shores of Earth, empty of the purpose that so drove her for all those years. Atlantis is but one more piece of technological flotsam, broken off from her purpose - to stand against the Wraith who drove the Ancestors from her halls - and although one can reason with logic, one cannot argue with a people too fearful to hope.

She swallows the bitterness that rises up within her and answers John’s anxious question. "Just a little distracted," she says, and reaches to take her son from John’s arms.

John’s fingers rest on hers for a moment as they transfer a tired boy from one to another, and in the lingering warmth of his touch Teyla can sense his own isolation - the sundering of who he must be from who he hoped to be.

They are both of them adrift on Earth.


End file.
